Thank you for this introduction, but even more, I want to say Thank You overall. I left the meeting feeling good – and I am still on a high. I am excited about the process, about getting some structure and definition to my business to really set it in a direction for (to use the corporate but accurate cliché) strategic growth.

I enjoy working with you, and it’s great having someone with your knowledge and expertise helping me define direction, but even more, holding me accountable to it (though I’m sure there will be times I won’t be so thrilled with that : )
I’m even excited to taking action on the steps we defined – and bringing that back to our next meeting.

Best,
Lisa

Your Business Coach

Ron Finklestein
330-990-0788
ron@akris.net
Call me with your coaching questions for a free consultation.

1.  What Do You Do? When I ask this question I always get the same answers: I am a financial planner. I am a business coach. I am a (fill in the blanks). I hate to break this to you but that is not what you do but how you do it. The prospect wants to know what outcomes they will experience when they work with you. That is the real answer to this question.

2. Why AM I Different?

Tell the prospect why you are different. All they really want to know is why your product or service is a benefit to them. Each of us is unique at what we do. The key is communicating this concept effectively to our prospect is so important.

3. Why should your Prospects Care that you are different. They only want to know how working with you will:

1. 1. make it safe for them?
   2. make them more effective?
   3. make them more productive?
   4. make them right?
   5. make them look good?

4. What do you do better than anything else in the world? Each of the examples below comes from real companies. What do YOU do better than anyone else in the world?

1. 1. Free shipping?
   2. Amazon 1-Click?
   3. Create relationships (accountant)?
   4. 100% ROI Guarantee?
   5. Highest quality (FORD)?
   6. Make memories (Disney)?
   7. Money back guarantee (GM)?
   8. Safety (Volvo)?

5. Why is that important to your prospects? Since you know what you do better than anyone else in the world, than show your prospects how it will:

1. 1. 1. Make them more money?
      2. Give them more free time?
      3. Create more value in their company?
      4. Save them money?

1. How can you prove it?

6. Finally, why buy from me? This is a very important question to your prospects.

• Do you have expert credentials?
• Do you have trusted relationship?
• Have you gotten results for others?
• Do you have endorsement from others?
• Does it make sense?
• Can you provide a track record of success?

Answer these six questions and then tell each prospect so they will know what you know.

Ron Finklestein
Your Business Coach

330-9900788

ron@akris.net

Take five minutes and what this video.   You will be glad you did. http://blog.mlmmainstream.com/

After you watch this video read this blog (less than 60 seconds)

http://kpkelly.blog.com/

and start moving towards what you want and not away from what you do not want.

Ron Finklestein
Ron@akris.net / 330-990-0788

According to SCORE, businesses fail for many reasons. I listed the top four below.

Lack of a well-developed business plan  78%
Not pricing properly  77%
Being overly optimistic – sales, money  73%
Not recognizing, or ignoring, what they don’t do well
 and not seeking help from those who do  70%
Ineffective prioritization  66%

Not having a business plan is the single biggest reason a small business fails and it drives all the other reasons a business fails.
A business plan has four primary objectives:
1.Defines what you do and why others will buy from you and your firm
2.Define the markets, companies, people, etc who can buy from you and how to reach them
3.Defines the road map to making money, where you need to spend your money (i.e., marketing, Internet, computers, fax, telephones, etc)
4.Defines weaknesses where you should be looking for help or areas to you need to address

A business plan is essential. You would not try to build a house with blueprints. Why would you start or run a business with the same type of blueprints.

The strange part is that if you don’t know how to do a business plan you need to ask. Number four above, really should be number one. If you don’t know what you don’t know, how do you know you don’t know it? How do you know to ask for help?

A business plan, depending on its purpose, can be a short as one page or more than 100 pages (venture capitalists want to know everything).

Just going through the exercise of writing a business plan will tell you more about what you don’t know about your business than any single exercise.

A business plan is a living document that should change as you and your business change. I will give you seven simple questions that you need to answer as part of your business plan:
1. Why are you in business? If you are not really passionate about your business, you will have trouble during the hard times and, most like you will lose interest and fail.
2. What are you selling? What problem do you think your product or service solves for your target market?
3. What is that one thing you do better than anyone else in my market? It could be as simple as free shipping to a lower price point using a new production break process.
4. Why would your target market care about what you do? Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself “what’s in it for me?”
5. Why would your prospects buy from you? Even if you are the best, will people buy form you and if so why?
6. How much money do I need to get started? Do not underestimate.
7. How will I make money and how long with it take before I am profitable.

I do not expect you have these answers to all these questions immediately (except #1). The answers to these questions will changes as you mature as business owner and you gain in understanding about your marketing, your industry, your products, your customers and your services.

The important part of this plan is to test everything. Ask your prospects and call your competitors, do research.  If you spend some time up front answering these questions, you will save yourself much pain and suffering.

Call me if you have questions and a free consultation.

Ron Finklestein
303-990-0788
ron@akris.net

I recently published my fourth book called Nine Principles to Inspired Action: A New & Targeted Perspective. A gentleman from New York read the book and called me up and he said “You are the new Napoleon Hill!” I was totally unprepared for his comments. 

I said: “Thank You. But want do you mean?” 

He started to going into details about my book as he talked about how I took the materials in Think and Grow Rich to a whole new level. 

Needless to say, I am flattered. Who would not be flatter when being mentioned in the same sentence with Napoleon Hill? I am only doing what I love: learning and sharing what I have learned. I do not what to confuse anyone, claim an identity that is not me or appear schizophrenic. I care deeply about my client’s success and I believe I need to stay ahead of them so I can continue to add value.  Some of the people who have impacted me the most, almost no one knows about. These are people who are my Business Mastery Advisory Board. Yes, I practice what I preach. Many of the concepts I write about hit my Advisory Board first, my client’s second and my blog third. 

My goal is to reach one million people with the concepts in this book. I am so passionate about this goal that I am giving away my methodology to any business coach, management consultant, small business owner or business executive that are looking for a way to get results, grow their business and generate more money. Though I am giving it away, there is a catch. You have to be trained in the process. The training is very affordably because I want interested parties to have some skin in the games so I know they are serious. 

The book Nine Principles for inspired Action took six years to research, test and write and it is the results of studying over 500 success small business owners (and many who were not successful). I choose small business because there has been much research done of very successful people but little that distills the behavior of the common man into action items that can be implemented immediately. The funny thing about this book is that it was never intended to be a book. I did this research for me and my clients, to help them and me be more successful. I want to continue to grow and prosper and get results. 

After I understood and distilled what I learned, I build several coaching programs to test drive these concepts. The results were powerful. So powerful that on one of my coaching programs I now offer a 100% guarantee. Simply put, if you do not recover the entire cost of the program, I will refund the difference. I can do that because the clients who followed the process get results; those who did not follow the process do not get the results. All I did was formalize what they were already achieving in a measurable, repeatable and predictable way. 

If you are someone who wants to achieve results, pick up the book. It is available on amazon.com. After you read the book, post your comments on Amazon so others can benefit from your efforts. I know some of the concepts in the book are controversial and will not be well received by some people. I am ok with that, because success, in today’s day and age requires us to think differently. 

If you want to learn more about using my methodology in your business call me at  330-990-0788 . I will answer any questions you have. 

Ron Finklestein

 330-…

ron@akris.net

I have (had, I just cancelled it) a credit card with Chase Bank for several years. I never missed a payment. 

I received a notice that my interest rate was going from 3.99% to 19.99% because of market conditions. What makes this so offense to me is that I just receive a piece of mail from Chase asking me to open a new Credit Card Account with an introductory rate of, get thing, nothing, zero, the big goose egg. And the interest rate after the introductory period is only 9.99%! What are they thinking? Or are they thinking at all?

This is weird. They created the conditions by giving loans to anyone who was breathing. Now they send me a letter saying because we screwed up you have to pay for our mistakes. What really angers me is that I have missed one payment in 30 years. The one I missed was one I thought my wife paid and I thought she paid it. 

I called customer service and the only option I had was to cancel the card or accept the 3x increase in interest. Now my credit rating will suffer because I cancelled a card, because Chase Bank sucks.

And to think the banks were given billions of tax payer money. I don’t know how much Chase received but they did receive the government money. Since they are not lending, they are holding their credit card customers hostage.

I told the customer service person I spoke with that I will do no more business with Chase. I would encourge anyone experience this to stop doing business with banks who are not ethical. Do not be confused, they are legal, not ethical.

I feel bad for the people who are not in the position to cancel their cards, did not read the notice (all legal bull shit) or if they read it, did not understand it (like me, that is why I called Chases Customer Service). Now I do.

I do not understand why our government supports and endorses such behavior from our banks. Banks cannot have it both ways. Either stop taking the money or take the government money and leave your card holders alone.

Frankly, I am tired of the perferred treatment the banks are getting from our government.  

Ron Finklestein

I am from the stone-age. I thought twitter was a waste of time. I would watch such things twitter past when I logged into Plaxo. The twitters included: I just woke up (who cares), I am eating dinner (then why are telling me, just eat), and a variety of other posts that just clutter up my Plaxo front page. I was comments to one of my friends who uses twitter regularly about this and he suggested I should sign up to see what all the fuss was about before I made any judgment.

I did sign up and ironically, I am having some fun posting to twitter. I had several people invite me and I am now inviting you to follow me: http://twitter.com/rfinklestein

One person who participates in a Marketing Mastery Advisory Board I belong to made the comment that I am the Dr. Phil of business coaches. It was a complement in the best possible way. She met that I use tough love to help her get results. It was nice to have something important like that to share on twitter.

I found it is a great way to break up my day when I work at home.

It is a great way to stay in touch (easily and quickly) with people I want to follow.

It is easy for others who share my interests to follow me.

Some people contacted me that I have not seen in a long while. It was good to hear from them.

So connect with me and I will return the favor.

Ron Finklestein

The Dr. Phil of Business Coaches.

330-990–0788

So often we spend our time trying to find new ways to improve our earning potential. The fact is we need to build our earning power inside ourselves. I call it: Learning is Earning…. and learning creates earning significant earning power.

I have a passion for learning and helping others learn. We know individuals who make a commitment to learn on a regular basis will earn more and realize their dreams quicker and more completely.

My version of “learning is earning” is found in the concept of continuous learning, which has become prominent over the past decade. Organizations are changing rapidly. Therefore, it’s difficult to find any approach to doing anything in organizations that doesn’t soon become outdated.

You must continue to upgrade your skill set regularly. Stephen Covey says: “The half-life of your knowledge is only 2-3 years.” Consider how fast information and technology are changing. It is estimated that the amount of new information will double every 72 hours by 2015. How do you keep up? How do you keep making yourself valuable to your organization? You must keep up by focusing on yourself and the principles of continuous learning. You must set goals to constantly add value to your organization.

The concept of continuous or self directed learning has become important because it places priority on noticing, adapting and learning from change. .

Self-directed training includes the learner initiating the learning, making the decisions about what training and development experiences will occur, and how. The learner selects and carries out their own learning goals, objectives, methods and means to verify that the goals were met.

But, where do we find this new knowledge?

One of the best sites I have found in years for continuous learning is a recently launched web site www.iLearningglobal.tv . It is a subscription-based website that gives subscribers the opportunity to learn, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week from the experts in the Professional and Personal Development arena. Check it out when you have a chance. In fact if you are interested to learn more, Ron Finklestein and Ralph Berge are hosting an introductory event on February 26^th at Rosemont Country Club from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Register at: http://akrisilg.eventbrite.com or call me at 330-990-0788 for details on this free tour of the web site. I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Ron Finklestein
www.rpfgroupinc.com
ron@akris.net
330-990-0788

You want an example? One business owner did not do billing because it took over one hour to create an invoice and he did 10 invoices a month. His total process should take 10 minutes per month.

The problem: he tried to force fit a tool that he used every day to do a task it was not designed for. He was using Outlook to do time and billing functions. He was over thinking it by trying to save money. As a result he did not do his billing until the end of the year and he let his clients use thousands of dollars of his money for free for almost a year. When we looked at his existing process, he came to the conclusion he could make this change in just a few hours.

If he focused on being effective, the right amount of efficiency would have been introduced. Since he focused on efficiency, his effectiveness was being compromised. Effective in this case was producing an invoice monthly in the fastest, more effective time frame possible.

Time is short. It is the only thing was have. Focus on the best use of your time, not the more efficient use of your time.

Ron Finklestein
www.rpfgroupinc.com
ron@akris.net
330-990-0788